Sunday, December 23, 2012

When we put the “body” and the pajamas on Adam, we chose
favorites. The blue! The one with the dogs! However, Adam doesn’t care. It isn’t
that he is indifferent so much as all of them are much the same to him. He
cries or sleeps in his foam bed. He recognizes our faces and touches. But as
far as objects go, outside of the flow of milk, the eyes and glasses that peer
down on him, the softness or roughness, dryness or wetness of the textiles he
comes into contact with, he has a bond with only one object. One bond that goes
beyond the sensual. Once bond that is, perhaps, his first experience of
fascination.

This is with Mr. Spooky.

Mr. Spooky is a milky white globe with bluisn circles for
its eyes and mouth, and bluish ears. Plug it in and press the top of it and it
turns on, emitting a bluish light that changes to green and back. The intensity
of the glow changes too. I don’t know who brought us Mr. Spooky, but it has
illuminated our darkest nights since the second day in the hospital, and Adam’s
second day on earth.

At night, as Adam digests his milk or formula at night and
ponders the world, at some point he always begins to stare at Mr. Spooky, wherever
we have perched him, wherever he casts his colored light. He may be looking at
a blanket, a pillow or a wall, but eventually he will shift and then he will
remain rapt in Mr. Spooky’s aura, drinking in Spookylight, in long pulls, just
as he sometimes drinks up formula.

I am not sure what Adam sees in Mr. Spooky. But I vaguely
recognize the reflex. I’ve been after Mr. Spooky substitutes my whole life –
fascinating objects, ideas, scenes, people that are beyond my mere round of
comforts and irritations, and that form an attraction that I can only explain
through a cracked, obsure poetry. That is because, in the end, these objects
are lit still in a pre-verbal night for me, back before the duty to match world
to word set me on an endless, exhausting chase. I like to watch Adam staring at
Mr. Spooky, it even makes me a little jealous. And it breaks my heart a bit to
think of all the Mr. Spookies yet to come for my Adam.

Tuesday, December 11, 2012

In the early nineteenth century, there was a great romantic
fashion for the “will” in the moral, or
ideological sphere. The will seemed like a way out of the dry materialism and
sensualism of the 18th century philosophes.Conveniently, it also had
a hero – Napoleon.

However, a curious thing happened as the century went
by.In the sphere of psychology, the
will gradually lost any status it had as a psychological object. In the old
rational psychology, it was one of the faculties of the intellect. But as
psychologists began to measure things, experiment, and consider psychology as
an adjunct of the entire biological system, it became clear that the will was a
superfluous entity. I raise my arm, and by no train of introspection, and by no
degree onany measuring device, is there
an intermediate moment where I will to raise my arm.

At the end of the century, two philosophers – Nietzsche and
William James – both took these findings at face value. Nietzsche took the absence
of any psychological entity called the will to mock the notion of both those
who argued for the free will and those who argued for determinism, in as much
as the latter still used this archaic psychological devise. James, with his own
sly Yankee wit, also went through the introspective stages that make us see
that the will is a conjuring trick.

Yet these two philosophers are associated with the will –
the will to power and the will to belief. How did they reconcile these moral
insights with their psychological ones? Well, in Nietzsche’s case, the will
moved outside the psyche. The psyche, in fact, becomes a manifestation of a
will that is unanchored to a self at all. James, on the other hand, creeps
close to the admission that the will, being a good thing to believe in, is
acceptable at least in moral terms.In
other words, both take the will as a supreme fiction.

In the twentieth century, in the psychological sphere, the
will was replaced by a cybernetic model of the psyche, one that emphasized
control and coordination. The old questions surrounding the will were simply no
longer relevant. This image not only provides psychology with its paradigm – it
penetrated, to an extent, into the public consciousness. Into, that is, our
moral speech. It is impossible to imagine Jane Austin characters speaking about
being out of control or in control. They wouldn’t say it, and they wouldn’t
understand it if it was said to them. But this has become a reliable part of
ordinary speech for those in the twentieth and twenty first century.

However, it is a part of speech that is not entirely
coherent with the will ideology, which still exists, and which still influences
the way we speak of ourselves and of the polis. It is easy to see why. We all
have the experience of doing things we don’t want to do. I have work to do and
it is late, but instead of going to bed, I do the work. And the moment of doing
something that is not immediately desirable – over something that is
immediately desireable – gives me the impression that I will myself to do this
over my circumstances. It is easy to think of a computer – say Hal in 2001 –
doing what it “wants” to do. But it is much more difficult thinking of it in a
will situation – doing what it doesn’t want to do.

This concept in the moral sphere is, I think, slowly
changing. It isn’t rare for a driver, or a computer user, to speak of a machine
‘not wanting’ to do something. Being ‘coaxed” into doing something. Of course,
at the bottom of this are the lines of routine that one imagines define the
machine – are the machine in the machine, so to speak. There’s no ghost in there.All I’m saying is that the dialectic between
the moral image and the cognitive image might well produce an inflection
decisively away from the will.

But I can’t think in that future language. I do think in
terms of control and coordination, and am marveling at its unfolding in Adam –
I watched him, last night, as he tried to get his fingers together and do
something with them on his cheek, under
his eye. Perhaps to rub an itchy spot. The tiny fingers did not, as with me,
coordinate, so that the index finger could be used to lightly rub across the
spot on the face while the rest of the tribe of fingers kept their places. And
the arm has not learned the steadiness and aim required for itching a scratch.
If, that is, this is what Adam was doing. In other areas, however, he is
already learning to ‘practice’ – for instance, in making sucking motions with
his lips. Instinct is already merging, here, with poetry – as it will when the
fingers don’t all bunch together, and the arm learns lessons about distance and
steadiness. All in due time, ma petit.

Monday, December 10, 2012

Adam has no language at 7 weeks, but he has music: burbles, humsm sighs, screams, cries, whimpers,
and something like a yahoo. Some of this music is communicative, although on a
low level. We react to the screams and cries – we transform them from music to
something with meaning for us – and perhaps Adam notices. Certainly he has
learned to ‘play’ us with some of his notes. Others, though, seem much more…
aesthetic. I find it intensely and
curiously pleasurable, for instance, that, after having fed him and hushed him
and soothed him in his bed, and having detected the slightest droopiness of his
eyelids, he gives a sigh. It is not a sign, this sigh. And it is not subject to
any rule of better or worse – in that sense, it is not aesthetic, as it doesn’t
really have any social function. Adam certainly doesn’t do it to please his
Dad. But he does it completely – it is a beautiful action, like some perfectly
realized athletic movement. His whole body participates in that sigh, as much
as it participates in the beating of his heart.

And I think, a year, two years. And never such sighs again.
And that is my musical addition, the slightly melancholic tinge I give to the
sigh, an awareness of time that Adam, wrapped in an immediacy as warm as his
pjs, doesn’t have.

Saturday, December 08, 2012

“The ship on which Theseus sailed with the youths and
returned in safety, the thirty-oared galley, was preserved by the Athenians
down to the time of Demetrius Phalereus.29 They took away the old timbers from time to time, and put new
and sound ones in their places, so that the vessel became standing illustration
for the philosophers in the mooted question of growth, some declaring that it
remained the same, others that it was not the same vessel.” – Plutarch, the
Life of Theseus

We are like sailors who on the open sea must reconstruct
their ship but are never able to start afresh from the bottom. We are like
sailors who on the open sea must reconstruct their ship but are never able to
start afresh from the bottom. – Otto Neurath

There’s a curious error in Barthes by Barthes – something that
is like a parapraxis, a Freudian slip. Like the classic instance of the
Freudian slip outlined in the Psychopathology of Everyday Life, this one, too, has to do with a classical
allusion.

It is contained in the entry entitled, The Argo.

“ A frequent image: that of the ship, the Argo (bright and
white), which the Argonauts replaced piece by piece, little by little, so that
in the end they had an entirely new vessel, without having to change either its
name or its form.”

This image seems to be a conflation of two classical
instances of the ship image in philosophy. One is the vessel of Theseus, which
is first mentioned by Plutarch in the Life of Theseus. In the early modern
period, Plutarch’s instance was taken up by Hobbes and Leibniz, each of who
commented on the paradox of identity that the ship names. The second is Neurath’s
ship. As Thomas Uebel has shown, Neurath often turned to the image of the
rebuilt but continuous ship in his writing. He especially used the image
against the Carnapian ideal of a meta-language – a dream language in which
syntax and semanticity would merge, so that we would know from the very
construction of a sentence whether it was true or not.This, Neurath thought, fundamentally
misunderstands language. Hence, the image of a ship which is constantly being
repaired from flotsam at sea by sailors who cannot simply go into port and take
the ship apart from the bottom.In Hans
Blumenberg’s exploration of ship metaphors in philosophy, he quotes an instance
where Neurath claims that the imprecise clusters are “always somehow part of
the ship.”

Out of these two separate images, Barthes chose to attach
the perpetually reconstructed ship to the Argo, which carried Jason and his
crew – the Argonauts – to Colchis. In constrast with Theseus’s ship, which –
being on display – is, as it were, a museum piece, the Argo is an object of
practical life. But there is another difference with Theseus’s ship, one that
should block Barthes’ appropriation. As Apollonius of Rhodes put it in the
Argonautica: ‘For a divine timber had been fixed in her: Athene had taken it
from the oak of Dodona and fitted it in the center of the prow.”

The wood of Dodona had the power of human speech – a power
that was given to the Argo. So, in fact, the Argo is the one instance of a ship
in which there is something irreplaceable.Which goes against Barthes point: ‘This vessel, the Argo, is very
useful. It furnishes us with the allegory of an eminently structural object,
created not by genius, inspiration, determination, evolution, but by two modest
acts (which cannot be grasped by the mystique of creation): substitution (one
piece drives out the other, as in a paradigm) and nomination (the name is not
at all tied to the stability of the pieces) by means of combining in the
interior of the same name, nothing is left of the origin. The Argo is an object
without any other cause than its name, without any other identity than its
form.”

As in any parapraxis, we are given an utterance that is like
a wound, allowing us, if we have the tools, to trace the trauma. The trauma
here is seems to be in the form of a forgetting – forgetting the magical/religious
instance. That forgetting marks the enlightenment heritage of structuralism –
in fact, Barthes mistake might be taken as emblematic of the fact that
structuralism was the purest outcome of the enlightenment, its endpoint.
Structuralism assumes, finally, that the world is saturated with substitutes,
is a system of substitutes – in a sense, the world is capitalism. And in this
world, action at a distance, magic, origin, Athene are chased away by a
universal forgetting . Under the guidance of the name – in the name of – the system
of substitutions can act on its own, automatically, without a genius.

In Barthes telling, these two acts just happen to coincide
in this one image. They are, however, historically bound together. In practical
terms, the crew of the Argo is simply trying to survive and stay afloat, which
is why all oak planks – whether from Dodona or from sea wrack – are replaceable.
From the point of view of nomination, however, whether the Argo is registered
as the Argo or not is of ultimate political importance. If the name doesn’t
hold, then the Argo becomes a pirate ship, an illicit ship. And at this point
the schema of substitutions feeds into a different destination for the ship.

The forgetting of the story of the Argo – the supervenience
of two other stories of ships and identity – is all the more freighted as
Barthes himself is in the midst of changing, as he wrote Barthes by Barthes,
from the disenchanted mapper of myths to the softer and more vulnerable utopian
of desire. He was, in a sense, letting one piece of Barthes drive out
another.Right after presenting the
image of the Argo, he personalizes it by contrasting his office in Paris with
his office in the country, which, though differently located, is identical in
function.He ends this passage by
writing of the Argo as the ideal structural object, in which the “system prevails
over particular beings.” But using an image which is structured to deny that
the system prevails over Athena – using an image of the one boat that can talk –
Barthes seems to be undermining his point – just as he is trying to shed his
structuralist past.

Wednesday, December 05, 2012

Adam has been fed and patted on the back and rubbed on the
belly – the ritual of faire le rot. He’s been deposited on his portable foam
bed with the special posture design and
the straps to make sure he doesn’t tumble out. He’s in his red pjs now, and as
he lolls there, stunned by the milk, his legs kicking, he reminds me – absurdly
– of some Cossack general, retiring from the night out at the gypsy camp. It is
the round, nearly bare head. And I proceed to the hushing part of the night,
which usually lasts from 15 to 30 minutes. It is a great exercise in patience,
saying, in various registers and various modulations, hush honey. I intersperse
this with tout va bien, Adam. He likes that. I can watch the effect on his
face. The big eyes get a little glassier, the eyelids droop. But just as I am
congratulating myself, just as he is on the threshold of sleep, he is yanked
out of the trance and begins to cry. He seems to be yanked out of sleep by the
sleep itself. Like digestion, like hunger, like his parents, constantly holding
him and moving him, sleep is a powerful external force. It comes from the
outside.

It makes me wonder what doesn’t come from the outside. Where
is the interiority in my wee little pea?

In an essay on consciousness in Essays in Radical
Empiricism, William James made the radical suggestion that the philosophers and
the rational psychologists have put us on the wrong track with their model of
consciousness. James announces this with the subtlety of a gunslinger clearing
out the saloon:

“I believe that ‘consciousness,’ when once it has evaporated
to this estate of pure diaphaneity, is on the point of disappearing altogether.
It is the name of a nonentity, and has no right to a place among first principles.”

James proposes, instead, that instead of sitting here with
two screens, one outside my body and one inside my mind, there is one screen
that forms something like a point at the intersection of two lines of
experience. James ends his essay with an account that, perhaps, Adam would
agree with:

“Let the case be what it may in others, I am as confident as
I am of anything that, in[Pg
37] myself, the stream of thinking (which I recognize emphatically
as a phenomenon) is only a careless name for what, when scrutinized, reveals
itself to consist chiefly of the stream of my breathing. The ‘I think’ which
Kant said must be able to accompany all my objects, is the ‘I breathe’ which
actually does accompany them. There are other internal facts besides breathing
(intracephalic muscular adjustments, etc., of which I have said a word in my
larger Psychology), and these increase the assets of ‘consciousness,’ so far as
the latter is subject to immediate perception;[24]
but breath, which was ever the original of ‘spirit,’ breath moving outwards,
between the glottis and the nostrils, is, I am persuaded, the essence out of
which philosophers have constructed the entity known to them as consciousness.”

Adam, perhaps, would make the case that it is not the
breath, but the scream. On the first day Adam was born, he was as exhausted as
his parents, and he didn’t make a sound as we all slept, an exhausted pod in
the hospital room. It worried me a bit, because I expected more sound. We got
it the next day.

Now we get it every day. It really isn’t that bad. Myself, I
think he needs to exercise his lungs and tire himself out, sometimes. But other
people in other apartments intrude into one’s consciousness – that glottal stop
and start – and besides, I don’t want Adam to scream too much, because I think that
this might not be good for the poor guy. So the screaming is followed by
holding, the bouncy bouncy, a pickup in the stream of hush honeys.

Still, I’m not satisfied with James’ account. Who is? And I
wonder, walking around holding Adam, about where the interiority is. Is it some
small lost thing in a baby? A peephole in a locked door to a dark room?

Well, that is much too dire an image. I am thinking that it
is more like a bathtub toy. It bobs on the surface, and is swooped down upon and
submerged time and time again, but each time it rises with irresistible force
to the top of the surface again. Of course, the surface does not “obey” the toy.
Later, the toy will get that illusion, and it will be forever after impossible to
disabuse it of that notion, which will go into a whole mythology of
responsibility, of “earning” things, of making, of owning. On the other hand,
the surface can’t drown the toy. It keeps bobbing up.

And so, between happy burbling, sleep, the satisfactions of
sucking, the enormous tragedy of changing diaper and clothes that fills the whole world,
and then abruptly stops, the little toy is, I think, already there. I can feel
it in my hands, it is palpable as we pace, bounce, and Adam goes – with a
protest or two – back to sleep.

Tuesday, December 04, 2012

We worry before the birth about the multitude of things that can happen, Down’s syndrome, the random birth defect like some serial killer, some small malignity hidden in our genes, or something we have perhaps done, some chemical we have absorbed, some toxic event in which we have unwittingly taken part. And then Adam is born and he is perfect. And then it occurs to us that he was safer in the womb than he will ever be again. He’s now in a world of sharp edges, chronic illnesses and conditions, traffic accidents, bad drugs and louche friends, plus he’s male. Male! If not prone himself to violence, and already I’m the parent who believes he can’t be, not my angel, he is as a male statistically prone to be the object picked on by other violent males. Last night, feeding him the bottle, I put my hand under his head, as I have done now a dozen times, and it suddenly struck me how fragile his skull was, how it was a work in progress, how I could feel its soft connections, the cartilaginous mesh that will eventually fuse to make the hard skull, such as the one that I possess. And my hand felt – this thinking hand - as well, how absolutely Adam’s head must be protected.

Friday, November 30, 2012

Among the learned in ancient India and Greece, the emission theory
of vision was standard. That theory proposed that subtle rays were emitted by
the eyes, which met objects and illuminated them. Alcmaeon, the Greek poet,
used the example of being struck in the eye as a proof that there is a ‘fire’
in the eye: “the eye obviously has fire within, for when one is struck (this
fire) flashes out. Vision is due to the gleaming – that is to say, the
transparent character of that which (in the eye) reflects to the object. And
sight is more perfect, the greater the purity of the substance. Empedocles
believed the visual, the eidolons of the things about us, are the product of
the merger of the rays of the eyes and the rays of the things. Indian scholars
had doubts about the rays of things – if this was so, we could see in the dark –
but they, too, believed that the eye emits rays. Interestingly, the Mohists in
China, working about the same time, accepted the reception theory – that the
eye receives light rather than projects it.

All of which is a matter of cherrypicking texts on the
intellectual level. On the folk
psychological level, the notion that the eye – unlike the ear, the tongue, the
nose, the fingers – has a certain active role in the world is hard to shake
off. One stares at a person hoping that person will look up and see one – and it
happens. Or we hide our eyes not only to keep ourselves from seeing something,
but to keep that thing from happening. Perhaps it is the structure of the eye,
with a lid that closes – which makes the eye ensemble a very different receptor
set from the other senses – that gives us this primitive sense of the eye as
projector. Piaget was the first childhood researcher to mention the fact that
the child’s theory of vision is often curiously like the ancient Greek theory
of vision.

Gerald Cottrell and Jane Winer have written a series of
papers about the “extramission” theory of the eye in children and adults. One
of their more startling papers, “Fundamentally
misunderstanding visualperception”,
concerns a survey they took among college students.

“For example, we typically found extramission beliefs among
college students who were

tested after they had received instruction on sensation and perception
in introductory psychology classes, thus suggesting not only that adults were
afﬁrming extramission beliefs but that such beliefs were resistant to
education. We were confronted, then, with the likelihood that students

were emerging from basic-level psychology courses without an
understanding of one of the most important psychological processes, namely,
visual perception.”

Interestingly, in the history of ideas, it was the Arabic
natural philosophers who first overthrew the “extramission” theory. In the
West, the names to look for are Nicolas de Cusa and Kepler. That Cottrell and
Winer find college students who believe the eye emits a kind of power is, to my
mind, much more interesting evidence of the intellectual folkways of Americans
than their poll-ready responses to questions about evolution. It is absolutely
unsurprising to a Freudian to find that numbers of adults believe that the eye
has some mysterious power. Projection and the omnipotence of thought are two of
the great pillars of Freudian anthropology.

Incidentally, this is how Winer and Cottrell made their
survey:

The test most recently used to examine extramission beliefs involves
computer representations of vision (see Gregg,Winer, Cottrell, Hedman, &
Fournier, 2001; Winer, Cottrell, Kareﬁlaki, & Gregg, 1996). We typically
instructed participants that we were interested in how vision occurs, sometimes
adding that we were speciﬁcally concerned with whether anything, like rays or
waves, comes into or goes out of the eyes when people see. We then presented a
series of trials in which we simultaneously displayed on a com-puter screen
various representations of vision that involved different combinations of input
and output. The participants then indicated which representation they thought depicted
how or why people see.” Among the choices was pure reception – the correct
choice, pure extramission, and a mix in which the eye bounces back information
to the object. Amazingly 40 to 60 percent of college students chose either pure
extramission or the idea of the eye bouncing back information on the object.

Intellectually, of course, I am down with Kepler and crewe.
But life is lived on a level of pure superstition as well. Especially when you
are raising a baby. Thus, I have found myself closing my eyes when shushing
Adam, as though my eye rays were keeping him up. Or as though some esp mimicry
action would work, where pure shushing doesn’t. Of course, it is true that
infants latch onto faces, but I close my eyes sometimes even when he is not
looking me in the face.

On the level of my psychopathological life, the eye, the
gaze, the stare, has a power that no other sensory state has. I do not believe
that I can change sound through my ear, but the thought creeps in that I can
change sight through my eye. I imagine that me – and forty to sixty percent of college students – are not alone. What car
driver has not decided to stare and point at a red light, willing it green, at
some point in his or her driving career? And yet where could this idea possibly
come from? I can’t imagine a similar thought about smell, hearing, or touch.

Of course, what other sense is so involved in our waking,
doing, communicating, having sex, entertaining lives? Aldous Huxley’s feelies –
in which touch would enter our waking world with the power of sight –
unfortunately has never been realized. Most of our working life is utterly
indifferent to touch – and our concern with smell is mostly that there not be
any. But the eye retains its mysterious, mesmerizing symbolic power over us.

All of which will make playing peekaboo with Adam when he is
a year older an interesting philosophical exercise, no?

About Me

MANY YEARS LATER as he faced the firing squad, Roger Gathman was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover
ice. Or rather, to discover the profit making potential of selling bags of ice to picnicking Atlantans, the most glorious of the old man's Get Rich schemes, the one that devoured the most energy, the one that seemed so rational for a time, the one that, like all the others - the farm, the housebuilding business, the plastic sign business, chimney cleaning, well drilling, candy machine renting - was drawn by an inexorable black hole that opened up between skill and lack of business sense, imagination and macro-economics, to blow a huge hole in the family savings account. But before discovering the ice machine at 12, Roger had discovered many other things - for instance, he had a distinct memory of learning how to tie his shoes. It was in the big colonial, a house in the Syracuse metro area that had been built to sell and that stubbornly wouldn't - hence, the family had moved into it. He remembered bending over the shoes, he remembered that clumsy feeling in his hands - clumsiness, for the first time, had a habitation, it was made up of this obscure machine, the shoe, and it presaged a lifetime of struggle with machine after machine.